What a mess.
Nuclear power was once touted as miracle of the future which would provide virtually free electricity. A nuclear power plant’s smokestack-less, clean profile was the very image of the sexy future. The world rushed to embrace it.
60 years later, sadder-but-wiser, we know that nuclear power has inherent flaws as a technology. There have been only a few out-and-out disasters, but a few is all it takes to mess up the world bigtime. Chernobyl and Fukushima are running sores, the latter the disaster that five years out keeps on unfolding like a slow motion train wreck. (A couple of weeks ago there was a story about scientists constructing an “ice wall” to try to limit the amount of radiation reaching the sea. Last week the story of the foiling of that plan by a recent hurricane.)
Part of the mess is the technology’s Achilles heel, the nagging disposal problem. How could they (how could we) have gone ahead with that little detail unaddressed?
Vulnerability to terrorist attacks is a part of the mess that wasn’t on our minds so much in the early days of nuclear development.
We have our own local version of the mess. How could they (could we) have sited Pilgrim with no evacuation plan for the Cape and islands? And from the geography of the situation, little likelihood of coming up with one? How could that have happened? And having done it once, how could we, still no hint of an evacuation plan have re-permitted it not once, but twice more?
The now almost predictable dysfunction of Pilgrim has been a dominant story for years. Our very own neighborhood power plant has become poster-boy for an aging and stalled-out nuclear industry in our country. But if we have learned what a worrisome mess the technology is to operate, we are only just learning about one of the messiest flaws of nuclear power: the process of shutting it down It isn’t easy getting this genie back in the bottle. It’s dangerous and costly; depending on the method used to store radioactive wastes, it can remain lethal and vulnerable for many decades.
Nuclear power is an inherently flawed technology. But put the profit motive into the mix and it gets even messier, and more dangerous.
Last year Entergy promised to close Pilgrim in 2019. That’s not soon enough for many, who ask why risk keeping it open that long, especially with the company less motivated to run it safely? But it has been a relief to at least have a start date for beginning the arduous de-commissioning process.
But recently we learned that another company, Exelon, has seen fit to buy another Entergy plant in upstate New York state that had been slated, like Pilgrim, to be closed. What’s to say Entergy won’t do the same thing in the case of Pilgrim– change their minds and sell to the highest bidder? They seem entirely bottomline oriented, about as trustworthy as Trump.
It’s a crime (even if a legal one) that this one unresponsive company can get away with inflicting this dangerous mess on the people who live here, on our towns, on our government.
The exasperation was evident in the wording of an announcement of a State House rally last Friday. “Enough is enough!… Call to Action…We will not tolerate another emergency shutdown!!!!” (Four–countem’ four– exclamation points!)
The governor “must” call for permanent shutdown, the announcement says, challenging our governor to be as protective of us as New York governor Cuomo is of his people.
What will it take to teach this company to be more responsive? One untapped yet obvious source of persuasion is young people, young families. With the most skin in the game, decades more future than the predominantly over-60 activists who have so far led the charge, they should be the most motivated to make sure the plant closes soon and that the messy process of cleanup is accomplished as safely as possible.
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